This is exciting. More detail up soon.

A quote from Novell: Demonstrating Inter-company Collaboration is a post from: The Geekorium

I’m not bringing it up now to point out the flaws in my year 8 education, but to highlight something about the way people learn. When Wave was first announced and launched it was described by various people as “sort of like email” or “part instant messenger, part Google Docs”. This is because we often find it easier to understand something new when we “pin” it on a concept we already know and understand. Likening one thing to something else is sort of like my metal filing cabinet I had in 8th grade, useful up to a point, but no way to go about using something on an advanced day-to-day basis.

Which is why I think Google or a third party need to seriously consider how the non-tech-minded are going to learn how to use Wave.

The problem as I see it is how the tech-illiterate are going to learn how to use Wave. I work in an industry where technology is secondary to the primary business, and am constantly amazed to find that there are still people who can’t use email and often even refuse to turn on a computer. It’s sometimes my job to explain even the most rudimentary of modern communication tasks. I might normally do this by comparing email to snail-mail, email addresses to post office boxes and so on. The user then keeps these analogies in mind the next time they use their email without me around.

With Wave, the analogies are all different. There aren’t yet clear real-world examples we can use to explain Wave concepts and so far all the analogies I’ve heard compare it to other technology concepts. For example, a wave is compared to a message board and individual blips are like single emails. While somewhat helpful for technology types, these analogies will fail with non-techies who are already struggling to map these concepts to the “real-world”. I suspect the thought-process to interpret these concepts might take two or three steps to “translate” these new ideas into ones the user is familiar with. So we have Mr Jones who has been told that a wave is like an email, which he remembers from his grandson is like a letter. But He’s also been told it can be used instantly like a telephone. Technically (and very loosely) these analogies are correct, but are they useful?

Perhaps this is exactly the reason the Wave team abandoned terms like “message” and “update” for brand new ones like “wave” and “blip” — to give everyone a level playing field when learning the new technology. I just can’t help wondering however if new names and ideas might be more confusing.

What I’d like to see is a third party developer build a wave solution (server and client) that addresses the new concepts in an involving and intuitive way. It’s widely known that Google builds software the engineering way — by doing it the simplest way they know how, then testing multiple variations over and over and continually refining. This incremental approach can only work when it’s almost there to begin with. The huge shift in thinking that Wave requires might never make sense to the non-technical when built by engineers. Another party however may be able to research the best way to school new users in Wave right in the interface.

A radically different wave-compatible alternative could open Wave up to a whole new set of users that might otherwise pass it over as “too technical”. If Google want to encourage the world to embrace Wave and abandon email, they will need all the help they can get building a translation-free wave experience for new users.

• Do you find Wave confusing?
• What do you think your less tech-savvy friends and family might think of Wave the first time they see it?
• How would you make Wave more new-user-friendly?

Image by http://www.flickr.com/photos/hectorl/ / CC BY-ND 2.0

French, Postboxes and Wave is a post from: The Geekorium

Shareflow: Focused conversations with people that matter [Zenbe]

Shareflow: a Google Wave Competitor? is a post from: The Geekorium

Can a startup challenge Google on the re-invention of e-mail?

Are tools like CC Betty approaching the re-invention of email in a more practical way?

The Re-Invention of Email is a post from: The Geekorium

A couple of people liked the idea, but thought the typography was lacking. So the next day I had a go at sprucing it up, and re-doing the typography.

I’m much happier with this, but I thought it was still missing something. So yesterday I made up the following. I really like it. Mil thinks its a little less clear, but I think you can see a bit of the Aussie outback in it now which is a nice touch (if I do say so myself). In case you’ve missed it, the logo is a stylised Australia, made of concentric rings (the de-facto symbol of podcasts) with a wire-in-circle in the centre to emphasis the “tech” or perhaps the “wired” in the name. I chose orange as it’s the colour of RSS feeds, but it doesn’t need to be orange — it could be any colour.

This helped me settle on a final form for the typography, and I decided to put together a logo pack to showcase the versatility of the logo in different forms. They don’t quite meet the requirements of the competition though, so I’m posting them here rather than cluttering up the forum the competition is running on.

First up, a horizontal version that separates the typography from the logo. The original brief asked that the logo contain the title “Tech Wired Australia” but I feel that a true logo needs to stand alone. I created this version to give a sense of how the logo could stand by itself to some degree within the design.

Next up, a mono-colour version as an example of how you could use the logo in a less colourful design (perhaps as a promotional badge, or on a sub-page you wish to stand out from the main site in some way).

The next two styles are just variations I tried, that although not as visually appealing as the few designs above, show the versatility of the design and some of the possibilities.

Finally, just for fun, and as a bit of cheeky poke to help tip things in my favour, I’ve included an iPhone bookmark icon, and a couple of favicons.

Hopefully this has been a little insight into my creative process. Check out the thread, and let me know how my attempt compares to some of the others. All constructive criticism welcome!

Please note: the designs showcased here are not under my usual Creative Commons Licence. I reserve all right to them up to the point that they (might) become property of the Tech Wired team. You may not use them to create derivative works, or use them in your own products.

2008-11-05 Minutes after I posted this, and put up my final submission they announced the winner! And it wasn’t me… But that’s OK, because they offered me a conciliatory $20 iTunes card because they liked my logo and want to use it on their website. You see the key here is, I misunderstood the brief — they wanted a “podcast logo”, and it didn’t click for me that this meant some thing like album art to display in iTunes. Clearly the person who won understood this immediately. I came at the whole thing thinking they were going to re-design their website. I’m kinda glad I misunderstood though, as if I’d realised what they wanted, I possibly wouldn’t have have bothered, and then I wouldn’t have learned what I learned from this competition. Including this tidbit: if the brief is unclear, get it clarified before you produce something the client doesn’t really want!

Logo Design: Tech Wired Australia logo competition is a post from: The Geekorium